Cultural Configurations in Clarice Lispector's Novels

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Modern Languages Publications Archive The Dry and the Wet: Cultural Configurations in Clarice Lispector’s Novels Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira Clarice Lispector has been acclaimed as one of the two greatest mid-century literary revelations in Brazilian literature. Her national equal can perhaps be found only in João Guimarães Rosa, her contemporary and revolutionary fellow artist. Virtually no Brazilian critic of note has failed to write about her: Gilda de Mello e Souza, Antonio Candido, Haroldo de Campos, Assis Brasil, Wilson Martins, José Guilherme Merquior, Roberto Schwartz, Eduardo Portela, Luiz Costa Lima, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda ... The list tends to grow longer by the day. A sample of this already vast body of criticism, incorporating a number of essayists outside Brazil, can be found in the collections issued between 1987 and 1989, to honour the tenth anniversary of her early death. For all their diversity, the essays - including new contributions as well as reprints of significant earlier works - share a common feature: they deal mostly with stylistic and philosophical aspects of the novelist’s œuvre, while its cultural and social aspects, when mentioned at all, are looked at en passant. We may take, for instance, the 1987 Minas Gerais Literary Supplement (‘Lembrando Clarice’), edited by Nádia Battella Gotlib. The Supplement starts with ‘No Raiar de Clarice Lispector’ (‘At the Rise of Clarice Lispector’), Antonio Candido’s prophetic 1943 essay. Candido praises Lispector’s first novel, Perto do Coração Selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart) written at seventeen, mainly for her innovative use of language. In a florid style, most uncharacteristic of this critic, a former sociologist, he praises her ‘impressive attempt to lead our awkward language into unexplored realms, forcing it to fit a world laden with mystery, making us feel that fiction is not an emotional exercise or adventure, but a real tool of the spirit, capable of penetrating some of the most intricate labyrinths of the mind’. Following in Candido’s footsteps, another reprint, Sérgio Milliet’s ‘Diário Crítico’ (‘Critical Diary’) underscores the unique style and psychological penetration of what strikes the critic as a ‘most serious attempt at an introspective novel’. Similarly, in ‘Passeando entre a Literatura e a Psicanálise’ (‘Strolling between Literature and Psychoanalysis ‘), Miriam Chnaiderman offers a mainly psychoanalytic reading of Lispector’s last novel, A Hora da Estrela (“he Hour ofthe Star), her most overtly ‘social’ novel. So also Lúcia Helena de OliveiraVianna de Carvalho, in ‘Clarice Lispector - um Exercício de Decifracão’ (‘Clarice Lispector - an Exercise in Decoding’) 116 concentrates on a Lacanian reading of Uma Aprendizagem, ou O Livro dos Prazeres (An Apprenticeskiy - or the Book of Delights), ignoring the apparent social bent of the novel. Only Vilma Areas’s ‘A Moralidade da Forma’ (‘The Morality of the Form’) stresses the socio-political implications of Lispector’s works. Maybe to refute criticism of Lispector’s allegedly alienated stance, the essay is illustrated by a 1966 photo of the novelist walking among a group of intellectuals on a protest march against the military ditactorship then ruling Brazil. However,ArêasS main concern is with literary craftmanship, with Lispector’s curious methods of ~ composition - putting together pieces of writing scribbled on unlikely writing materials, such as cheque books and odd bits of paper. (Lispector later re-wrote her work painstakingly, as Nadia Batella Gotlib’s recent literary biography demonstrates). Mirtatis mutandis, the pattern is repeated in Remate de Males 9, a I much more ambitious and varied anniversary collection, edited byvilma Arêas and Berta Waldman at the University of Campinas in 1989. Though allusions to the social implications of Lispector’s fiction - especially in reference to nie Hour l of the Star - pop up intermittently here and there, the general tone remains roughly similar to that of nie Minas Gerais Supplement. The introspective and philosophical aspects of Lispector’s output, including possible interrelations with phenomenological-existential thought, previously investigated by Benedito Nunes in O Dorso do Tigre (“/ie Tiger’s Back) and LÆitura de Clarice Lispector (A Reading of Clarice Lispector) remain uppermost. Nunes himself contributes an essay to the Campinas anniversary collection. Nonetheless, even though he writes about two novels audibly reverberating with social reflections - 77ie Passion according to G. H.and The Hour oftlie Star - Nunes focuses chiefly on what he calls Lispector’s ‘transposition of the mystical expression’ and ‘schizoid approach to writing’, recalling Barthes’s ‘vertiginous cision of the subject ‘ (68). Other essays in the Travessia 9 anthology are not a far cry from Nunes’s. Carlos Felipe Moisés studies Lispector’s writing as an instance of the crisis of fiction, representative of the human division, ‘in permanent anxiety before the impenetrability of the interior world, while simultaneously fascinated by objects and by the surroundhg physical world’ (153). This recalls Lispector’s maddening complexity, which dooms any attempt at a comprehensive view of her work. The reprint of Alexandre Eulálio’s 1961 interview with the novelist briefly I mentions the national dimension of her writing, but then goes on to stress her ‘supranational’ interest in subjective experience. Similarly, Luciana Stegagno Picchio writes about what she considers to be the outcome of most critical attempts to apprehend Lispector’s work as a whole: a perception centred on the notion of epiphany - écriture as the revelation of ‘something essential (...) an instantaneous and transfiguring apparition (. ..) which unexpectedly becomes visible’ (17). Plinio Prado Júnior’s analysis in ‘O Impronunciável’ (‘The Unpronounceable’) comes out in terms of the Kantian sublime.... Earl E. Fitz, 117 The Dry and the Wet from Pennsylvania State University, writes in another vein. He tries to place Lispector on the international scene. He associates her with the stream of lyrical narrative - along with Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, André Gide, Katherine Mansfield and Herman Hesse - as well as with the phenomenological tradition, shared by such diverse writers as Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Genet, Borges and Robbe-Grillet. Fitz stresses Lispector’s kinship with Woolf, claiming that they both construct texts organized by means of images and of moments of psychic perception. He ends up by endorsing Hélène Cixous’s representation of the Brazilian novelist in Vivre l’orange as an instance of a ‘peculiarly female attentiveness to objects, the ability to perceive and represent them in a nurturing rather than in a dominating way’ (35). Cixous’s own views - including her evaluation of Lispector as ‘the greatest writer in the twentieth century’ (43) - are likewise represented by her essay ‘Reaching the Point ofwheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman’. Lispector’s relationship with the Jewish mystical tradition in the short story ‘O Búfalo’ (recalling Nelson H. Vieira’s earlier interest in Lispector’s ‘Jewish expression’), and her painstaking rewriting of Agua Viva (The Stream OfLi+) - which the author describes as a cyclical narrative, ‘yearning to penetrate into the primary, universal flux’ - make up the gist of Gilda Salém Szklo’s and Alexandro Severino’s essays. Three other articles - by Glenda A. Hudson, Nádia Batella Gothb and Eduardo Prado Coelho - sketch Lispector’s affinities with, respectively, Katherine Mansfield, Fernando Pessoa and Marguerite Duras, the latter in the light of Deleuzian insights. Moving back to Lispector’s use of language, Berta Waldman and Vilma Areas’ Eppur Se Muove study her appropriation of aphorisms and clichés to signal the failure of the male protagonist in challenging capitalist society in A Maçã no Escuro (The Apple in the Dark). Again, a sidelong glance is thrown at the socio- cultural background, without, however, making it the focus of attention. Occasionally, interest in cultural facets becomes less tangential in the Travessia 9 collection. In ‘La Narradora: Imágenes de la Transgresión en Clarice Lispector’ (‘Women Storytellers: Images of Transgression in Clarice Lispector’), Márgara Russotto, from Universidad Central de Venezuela, investigates Lispector’s treatment of ‘feminine misery, woman’s hopeless marginalization’ (89). The essayist traces the path of Lispector’s women narrators as engaged in discourses closely linked with woman’s evolution. According to Russotto, Lispector starts with ‘a youthful, ambitious attempt at a global interpretation of the world and of the subject’, then moves on to the ‘micro-universe of the family and its heavy conflicts’ until, shortly before her death, she ‘assumes the anonymous, strident voice of the old women storytellers of popular tradition’ - a gradual change towards socialization and collectivization. Nelson H. Vieira, fiom Brown University, in ‘The Stations of the Body, Clarice Lispector’s Abertura and Renewal’ writes about the ‘seemingly simple, concrete and realistic I ‘short stories collected in A Via Crucis do Corpo (The Stations Ofthe Body), where 118 Lispector surprises her readers with a sudden concern with sex. Vieira comments on the ‘shift in her narrative approach’, in the late seventies, revealing ‘a sociological consciousness’ (76,78) which the critic does not seem to discern in her previous fiction. However, he refers

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